Little did a young American couple, Greg and his beautiful bride
Heidi, imagine what would happen when Pierre, the young Frenchman who
has appeared in many of Allan Aldiss’s stories, offered to arrange
for them to spend their honeymoon in a romantically remote Arab
Sheikhdom – and promised that no one would know where they had
gone.

After being accused of drug smuggling, Greg was infibulated and Heidi
lost to the Ruler the virginity she had been carefully saving to give
to her young husband. However, she had not been expensively acquired
for his harem, but for something else: his private brothel to which
members of the Ruling Families of his oil-rich neighbouring
Sheikhdoms are invited to indulge their fantasies in return for
substantial financial loans.